


How to be Brave

by kyrieanne



Category: The Brave (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 07:43:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16091135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrieanne/pseuds/kyrieanne
Summary: I don’t have dreams of my own, she says back.And because she isn’t asleep she doesn’t glimpse the flicker of his eyes. She has to imagine it – the quiet assessing that sees right through her even in their dreams, those things made of light and hope and nightmares. He always sees right past all that bluster.That’s how it works between them.Or, the one in which Jaz builds homes, Adam comes home, and they ask if its fate.





	How to be Brave

**Author's Note:**

> For N, J, S, and L; here's to cheering on one another's dreams. 
> 
> Thank you to N for letting me borrow blatantly from her life story.

_a year ago_

 

  1. **Anything else we should know?**



Jaz’s hand hovers over the page.

 

Her brain hovers on the word _should_ – it gives her permission to leave it out, the dreamwalking. Recent rulings declared it illegal for health insurance companies to classify it as a pre-existing condition, and the ACLU is forever reminding people it was illegal for employers to ask you if you are a dreamwalker. Not that that stopped people from finding out.

 

Her pen scratches the paper and she forces herself to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth. It’s a habit learned from the social workers who first tried to help her through the panic that came with dreamwalking. It was a way of returning to her body and the real world, the one that matters.

 

_Your dreams matter too._

 

It’s as if he’s sitting there in the office with her. His voice is clear and the timber deep and male like always. She wonders if he really sounds like that in real life or its just how he dreams himself to be.

 

Reflectively, Jaz checks her watch. He’s somewhere in Turkey. Adana if her rudimentary research skills are correct since that’s the location of a major U.S. base and there’s this coffee shop in the city he sometimes dreams them into, called ABA Kitabevi Coffee. She found it on Google maps here in the real world. She’s pretty sure that’s where he’s stationed on this deployment.

 

Adana is seven hours ahead so it makes sense that he’s asleep, and even though dreamwalking usually requires both parties to be asleep, with Adam it’s always been different. They’ve never fit into the rules. So it makes sense that the voice in her head is really his, or at least his dream-self, quietly prompting her to remember why she is here in the first place.

 

 _I don’t have dreams of my own,_ she says back.

 

And because she isn’t asleep she doesn’t glimpse the flicker of his eyes. She has to imagine it – the quiet assessing that sees right through her even in their dreams, those things made of light and hope and nightmares. He always sees right past all that bluster.

 

That’s how it works between them. If he’s asleep she can still dwell there in his dream even when she’s awake. She can’t see or feel him, but she can hear his voice and he can hear her. Jaz has no idea why with Adam she breaks all the rules of dreamwalking, and hearing him when she’s awake is rare even for them. It only happens when one of them is feeling anxious or unsure. It’s as if they are groping through a darkness and finding that steady anchor on the other side, a hand to grip tight.

 

 _Your dreams matter too_ , he repeats and she huffs a little there in the clinic office.

 

 _We’ll talk about this later_ , she answers as she puts her pen down.

 

  1. **Anything else we should know?**



Jaz leaves that part of the application empty because she decided a long time ago being a dreamwalker isn’t who she is. It’s a part of her as boring as her brown eyes or uncanny hand-eye coordination. It’s why you’ll find no hint of her truth online or anywhere else in her life, save for her sealed records from Child Protective Services. Buried in those files is the stark picture of how the condition manifested after she was taken away from her parents and how it wrecked her as a teenager. While more and more dreamwalkers come out, she has no desire for the world to know it about her.

 

As Jaz hands in the clipboard and application to the man at the clinic front desk she thinks of that girl in those sealed records.

 

“All set?” the man at the desk smiles to her, and she offers a shaky one in return.

 

“As much as I’ll ever be.”

 

The look he gives her is kind and part of Jaz hates that her nervousness is that apparent on her face. She doesn’t like people seeing that side of her.

 

“Making family is always brave,” he offers as he shows her back to an office. The gold sign reads Dr. Patricia Campbell, OBGYN.

 

It’s for the girl who she once was: alone in the world, floating through the foster system, and desperate to belong to someone – it’s for that girl that Jaz is here. The girl without dreams or a family. Jaz wants to give that girl someone to belong to, and that starts today with her application for a sperm donor to have a child of her own. Leaving the information off the application is smart, she thinks, because being a dreamwalker has nothing to do with being a parent, she tells herself, any more than it has to do with any part of her real life.  

 

 _What about me?_ Adam’s voice is cheeky and she knows he’s goading her to distract her.

 

 _You’re not exactly real_ , she teases without thinking.

 

She flinches at that because they both know it’s not true. He isn’t a figment of her imagination. He’s a real person, an American soldier serving somewhere overseas, and she’s been part of his dreams since that day when she was eighteen and spending her first night out of the foster system. She’d fallen asleep in a shelter because she hadn’t had anywhere else to go, and while she’d been dreamwalking for years, that had been the first time with him.

 

 _I didn’t mean that,_ she hurries. In the doctor’s office she swings her legs and her work boots scuff the carpet. They’re clean, but maybe she should have put a dress on. What do you wear to an appointment about making a baby?

 

 _I know_ , he says. Without being asleep, Jaz can’t see his face there in his dreams when he says it to her. _Go do what you need to do. I’ll be here when you fall asleep._

 

And then he’s gone and Jaz is alone in the overly air-conditioned office.

 

***

 

**Dreamwalking Bill Attracts Proponents and Critics**

NEW YORK TIMES

September 25, 2017

 

“ _Dreamwalker_ has become the colloquial vernacular for what the American Medical Association calls a ‘ _hyper_ _dopaminergic pathology_ ’ but rights activists argue the term and belief dreamwalking is new is false.

 

“Dreamwalking – if you want to call it that – has existed in cultures for thousands of years,” says Margaret Adwood, president of the Neurological Freedom Society.

 

One of the largest dreamwalking advocacy groups, the Neurological Freedom Society points to traditions found in other cultures as evidence for their claim. Examples listed in their literature include:  the Navajo term skinwalkers, shamans in Africa, Asia, and the Americas known to enter into a shared dream world, and in the Bible, when the Apostle Peter shares a dream with an Italian Roman soldier named Cornelius. They also suggest modern psychology has been circling around this phenomenon ever since Carl Jung termed the phrase collective unconsciousness.

 

Adwood adds, “Just because modern science has new tools and doctors have given it a name doesn’t mean it hasn’t always been part of who we are. We need to embrace the fact that humans have a greater neurological diversity than we care to admit. There is more than one way of being human.”

 

Whether it is new or not, _hyper_ _dopaminergic pathology_ is a medical classification for individuals for whom the dopamine pathways in their brain, which are thought to be responsible for much of the mechanics of dreams, are structured differently than the majority of human beings.

 

It is only within the last five years since brain imaging technology has allowed scientists to see the physiological differences. The result is a sharp increase of people both being diagnosed and self-disclosing that diagnosis in their public lives.

 

This has lead to a flurry of opinions from law-makers about privacy concerns.

 

“These people can enter our heads,” Texas Senator Warren Smith said during a senate debate of his proposed law, which would require all dreamwalkers to be identified on any government issued identification, including driver’s licenses and passports. “And I’m not saying they are all dangerous, but the people have a right to know.”

 

Both opponents and proponents of the law both point to recent unconfirmed reporting from multiple news organizations that the Pentagon has begun recruiting dreamwalkers to work with soldiers diagnosed with PTSD. The theory is by entering into soldiers’ unwaking consciousness greater accuracy might be achieved in personalized treatment plans. Proponents of the law argue the Pentagon program, if it exists, underscores the power of dreamwalkers. They suggest the unknown potential must be carefully regulated as a matter of public safety.

 

“This is as much about the safety and rights of dreamwalkers as it is everyone else,” Senator Smith argued in the bill’s introduction.

 

The bill’s opponents counter that the alleged military program is an example of how individuals might be coerced and controlled.

 

“We can’t forget these are people just like you and me,” Adwood says, “and they deserve the right to self-determine. This is America.” 

 

***

 

 The first time Jaz meets Adam is the first time she is grateful to fall into someone’s dreams.

 

She’s asleep in one of the beds at a women’s shelter in D.C. and it’s her 18th birthday. Her foster mother had made a mild effort to find out what Jaz had planned once she was too old to be the state’s burden.

 

“I’ve got a job,” Jaz shad aid as she slung her backpack onto her shoulder. Her foster mother frowned, but then one of the other children she cared shouted, there was a muttered _be right back,_ and then she forgot to ever circle back to Jaz for an answer. Jaz didn’t freely offer the full truth. It was easier that way.

 

It was true, Jaz had a job in construction. At fourteen, she bought a fake ID and got herself hired onto a crew working weekends on fancy homes in the suburbs. She’s not entirely sure how she talked her way onto that first crew; he asked if she was legal and she said yes without missing a beat. In the beginning she ran errands for the guys, did the menial work of painting and mudding drywall, and learned everything she could. Men grabbed her ass and laughed about it. Her boss laughed too before telling them all to get back to work. He wasn’t paying them to jerk off.

 

So Jaz learned to never wind up working alone with one of the men old enough to be her father, but she also learned how to lay tile and hang a door. She liked the satisfaction of using her hands to make something. It was tangible, the wood and metal and wire. She spent her weekends in the homes where bored teenager girls her age tanned by the pool and housewives hovered over the construction crew worried they were going to mess everything up. It was obvious the reason her boss sent her to deal with said housewives was because she didn’t have a dick, but somehow Jaz found herself good at it. She could explain what they were doing in words the client could understand, and she learned how to listen and translate their vague ideas into actual plans for her crew.

 

It wasn’t until she was sixteen that her weekend gig morphed into real plans. It was because that was when she met Elijah. He was filling in for their plumbing guy on a kitchen renovation in the ritziest D.C. suburb. The house was ridiculous:  marble and arched windows and more antiques than Jaz had clothes. From the beginning, Jaz made a point to stay away from Elijah. He wasn’t gross like the other guys, but she felt like he might be able to see right through her when he looked at her.

 

Then one day she got caught in the rain and missed her bus back to whatever shity foster home she was staying in at the time. It’d be another hour until a bus came. Jaz was tired and sore. The house they’d been working on had a teenage girl Jaz’s exact age and today there had been a flock of them in bikinis, gossiping around the pool, and whenever Jaz turned off the wet saw she was using to cut tile she’d hear their shrieks and laughter. It’d made her exhale through her nose and now stuck in the rain with her sweaty work clothes clinging to her ribs and underarms, she was so damn tired.

 

Enter Elijah and his dumb orange pickup truck. It rumbled down the road as if no one had bothered to tell it that in this neighborhood cars purred and certainly never backfired so loud it sounded like a shotgun. As he approach, Jaz had ducked her head and hunched her shoulders. _Please don’t let him see me_ , she willed. _Please._

 

But of course he did because Elijah is annoyingly observant. He pulled up to the shoulder and rolled down his window. It only goes half way down because the truck was a falling apart wreck (classic, if you asked him)

 

_“Need a ride?”_

_Jaz shook her head. He waited and Jaz willed herself not to budge. Nothing good could come out from being alone and at the mercy of one of her co-workers. Thunder clapped and Jaz jumped. Storms always reminded her of the night she was taken away from her parents._

_Elijah got out of the truck with both of his hands held out, palms out, “I’m gay,” he said._

_Jaz blinked, “What?”_

_“I have no interest in touching your ass or any other part of you like that,” he said. His gaze landed on her face and Jaz found she wasn’t fearful, but she was still uneasy._

_“You’re not eighteen are you?”_

_“Of course not, I’ve been working for Terry for two years. I’m twenty.”_

_He ran a hand over his face, “Shit, Jaz you and I both know that’s not true. Terry knows – he had to know the day he hired you and has chosen to ignore it as men sexually assault you. A furking minor.”_

_Jaz felt her cheeks burn despite the cold rain stinging her skin._

_“I don’t want a ride so you can leave now.”_

_“How old are you really?” he asks, “None of the guys know I’m gay so I’ll trade you one secret for another.”_

_“Sixteen.”_

_“And your parents don’t care you’re working on a construction site with grown men?”_

_“I don’t have parents.”_

_He didn’t ask for an explanation. Instead, Elijah’s voice shifted, “Jaz, Let me help you. Please.”_

 

And that is how Jaz found herself that first night in the shelter blinking up at the ceiling talking herself in and out of calling Elijah. In the two years since that day in the rain, he’d opened up his own company of flipping houses and the first person he hired – long before he could afford the cost – was Jaz.

 

It was in those two years that the idea had first begun to form in her mind. Elijah took the time to train her. He told his trades to do the same. She was good at detail work, he said, and he trusted her common sense.

 

“You have good ideas,” he told her after he’d sold their second house. It wasn’t one of the McMansions she’d worked on for Terry, but rather a bungalow from the 1950’s a few blocks from an elementary school. The family that bought it fell in love with the reading nook Jaz built into the walk in closet in one of the children’s bedrooms. It was just something she’d made from left over lumber, a bench seat that flipped up for storage, right under the little round window that marked the gable pitch of the roofline. There was a little girl moving into that bedroom, and Jaz went home smiling that day both from the compliment and the knowledge that little girl would grow up loving something Jaz helped to build. She would call it home.

 

It took time for Jaz to muster up the courage to talk to Elijah about her idea.

 

_“What if I bought into your next flip?” she said the next time he asked._

_“Seriously?”_

_“Yeah,” Jaz picked at the paint drying on her forearm. “I’ve never spent any of the money you or Terry have paid me. It’s not much, but it’ll give me a percentage of whatever you sell the thing for, and I’ll work extra hours, ones you don’t have to pay me for, on it.”_

_She licked her lips because all of her rationalizations for why Elijah should do this seemed childish now. Jaz knew she was asking him a favor, but she’d be 18 in less than a year. No one was going to advocate for her; she was going to have to do that herself._

_“Nevermind,” she said in a hurry when he didn’t say anything. “It’s probably dumb.”_

_“I don’t want you to buy into my next flip,” Elijah said. “Buy into the company. That’s my only offer.”_

_“The company? But it belongs to you.”_

_“Buy into the company and come help me build it into something real. You won’t get the ROI as fast, but you’ll get more and you’ll keep getting it the more we grow.”_

_He looked at her with a grin as if the idea of working with her made him happy._

 

So she agreed despite having no idea what ROI meant and it wasn’t until later when she looked it up on the school computer that Jaz realized that if she sunk her entire savings into Elijah’s company she wouldn’t have enough for a deposit on an apartment or a down payment on a car. At least not right away. But _this_ _work_ and doing it with Elijah felt as close to a dream as she will ever have.

 

That is how she winds up in a homeless shelter staring at the water stained ceiling tiles as women snore around her. She tells herself this is good; she has plans. But the tears still well up. Her high school graduation ceremony was today, but she didn’t go. Elijah would have taken the day off to sit in the audience and embarrass her by whooping when she walked across the stage; he probably would have dragged McG, his best friend, with as well. But Jaz didn’t want the memory of classmates she’s gone to school with for years pulling one another into photos, happy and carefree. She didn’t want to hang on the edge of it all watching but never having.

 

 _I just want one night without other people’s dreams,_ she thinks as she stares at the ceiling.

 

Jaz doesn’t believe in anything enough to pray. But on that night she’s as close as she’s ever been. Closer than from the nights she cried herself to sleep after a round of her father’s abuse. Closer than when authorities removed her from that house. Closer than that first night in her first foster home, eleven years-old and terrified enough to wish to be back under her parent’s roof. Tonight, Jaz silently trembles and says the words over and over, _if I can’t have dreams of my own please, can I not walk in other’s?_

That is the night she meets Adam Dalton.

 

He’s dreaming of a field and a starry night. She sees him there on a blanket, his arms tucked behind his head and his legs crossed at the ankles. She hovers at the forest edge, but he seems to sense her because he sits up and stares in the direction of where she hides in the shadows.

 

“Is someone there?”  

 

Jaz doesn’t want to be here, but for some reason she steps out into the moonlight. He isn’t frightened; no one is ever frightened when they find her in their dreams. Rather he stands as she approaches and she notices he’s barefoot.

 

“Are you real?” he asks.

 

“Yes.”

 

“You feel real.”

 

“You won’t remember me,” Jaz explains.

 

“I know. There was a guy at basic training who is a dreamwalker; he talked about how it works.”

 

They stand there and it’s awkward. Jaz always hates this part. She doesn’t like having to reassure people in their own dreams.

 

“Would you like to sit down?” he gestures to the blanket.

 

They settle crosslegged side by side.

 

“I’m Adam,” he says as if remembering that they don’t actually know each other.

 

“Jaz.”

 

He leans back on two hands, “What’s your story?”

 

“This is your dream. We don’t have to talk about me.”

 

“What if I want to?”

 

“It won’t matter. You’ll forget it the instant your eyes open.”

 

“Then tell me the version you’d never tell someone in real life. I mean, there’s got to be a reason, right, you’ve walked into my dream tonight?”

 

Jaz thinks of that whispered plea on her lips as she fell asleep, and how it hadn’t come true.

 

“It doesn’t work that way. I dreamwalk into random dreams. Whoever I’m near when we’re both asleep. It sounds mysterious to people who don’t do it, but it really isn’t about fate. My brain just works different than yours.”

 

Adam is quiet and Jaz pulls on her fingers until the knuckles crack. She steals a look at his profile:  a strong nose, eyes the color of water, and a baby face that she suspects would be greatly improved by some scruff or a beard. He looks healthy and strong; he mentioned military training. She’d bet he’s sleeping on the other side of the shelter in the men’s dormitory, a vet who once was this boy sitting next to her before war broke him. She wonders what he really looks like now.

 

He scratches an ear, “I’m not one to argue with someone who knows more than me, but I’m not anywhere near you. Wherever you are. I’m in the middle of the Sahara desert on an op; the only person near me for hundreds of miles is Preach and you are definitely not him. So as far as I can figure whatever is happening here between us breaks some sort of rule. Might as well call that fate, I figure.”

 

He looks at her with a cocky grin that will never cease to steal Jaz’s breath every time she sees it. But that first time it throws her so much that she forgets about those words on her lips as she fell asleep. She tells him her story because there are no stakes; they are two ships and the sky around them is as dark as the sea. And because he’d asked.

She tells him her true story because he asks, and for the first time she is grateful to dreamwalk.

 

***

 

_a month ago_

Jaz hears her front door open over Naaji’s wails and then McG’s booming voice.

 

“Uncle McG is here,” he shouts from the front of the house, “everything is going to be okay.”

 

She happily puts her daughter into her friend’s hands as he enters her kitchen with both arms stretched out. But unlike last week when that would have worked, it only causes Naaji to cry harder. It’s almost worth seeing McG’s horrified face. Almost.

 

“But I’m her favorite,” he rocks Jaz’s three month-old daughter in his lanky arms and for a second Jaz is hit with how big she’s gotten in just three months. She remembers McG holding Naaji in the hospital, a tiny cocoon of a baby swaddled and sleeping. Now she can roll over and watches people gesture and talk with rapt attention. She’s also decided that no one but Jaz can hold her. Elijah explained to Jaz it’s common, the stranger danger phase, and she made fun of him for memorizing every baby book he read.

 

“Someone has to do it,” he grumbled.

 

The only way Jaz has used those books was to prop up whatever piece of furniture she was refinishing at the moment. She’s approaching motherhood the same way she did construction:  learning as she goes.

 

Jaz takes her daughter back and gestures toward the steaks she’s seasoned. “Make yourself useful. Put those on the grill.”

 

McG steps outside to her deck. Jaz checks her phone and Naaji’s crying makes sense. It’s past time for her to eat. She settles down at the kitchen table and unclips her nursing bra. None of her usual uniform, t-shirts and the occasional polo with their company logo on it, make for great nursing tops so Jaz has a set of basic blouses she bought on clearance from the maternity section at Target. They have bright colors and floral prints on them, but she reminds herself it is only temporary.

 

McG returns from outside and as he pulls a beer from the fridge, he says, “Jazzy, if I say I’m still not used to you just whipping those things out to nurse am I being an asshole?”

 

“Yes. Breasts were made for feeding a child. Get over it,” she doesn’t even bother to look up at him. Instead, she skims a finger along Naaji’s tiny fisted hand. Her skin isn’t as dark as Jaz’s; the donor had been white, but she does have Jaz’s coloring. The most obvious difference between mother and daughter is the shape of her eyes. They are slanted and tip upwards as if permanently poised to laugh.

 

After the labor, when Elijah and everyone else had gone home, and it was just Jaz with her daughter sleeping on her chest, she’d traced the outline of those eyes and made a promise to give Naaji a childhood spent laughing rather than being afraid.

 

 _You are brave,_ Adam had said to her then; his voice so clear in her head that it felt like he was there in that room. Since her pregnancy it’d become more common for him to reach out to her in his dreams despite her being awake.

 

 _Naajidah means brave lioness,_ Jaz told him. _She reminds me to be one when I’m not sure what the hell I’m doing._

_Jaz Khan, you’re turning sentimental,_ he said.

 

_Don’t tell anyone._

_I wouldn’t even if I could._

Tonight, Jaz watches her daughter happily eat and sits comfortably in silence with McG as he joins her at the kitchen table. Elijah is on his way; their new project manager is joining them for the first time for their regular Friday night dinners. Jaz let Elijah handle hiring Amir while she was on maternity leave so she hasn’t met him yet. It makes her nervous bringing someone new onto the team without knowing anything about him.

 

She’s about to ask McG about his impression of the new guy when her phone pings. It’s a notification and the question is there as she opens the Facebook messenger app to see a note from a stranger.

 

But then she reads it and Jaz forgets everything else.

 

_Hello!_

_This might be strange, but I think our children have the same donor, which is only made stranger by the fact that I definitely bought a house from you six months ago. I remember we chatted about being pregnant. I found out about the match through the donor bank and just had to message you when I realized the connection. Seems like fate._

_Nikki Dalton_

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The Brave premiered a year ago so I wanted to post the first chapter of this to commemorate. 
> 
> You can find me at kyrieanne on Tumblr and kyrieanneflails on Twitter.


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